The Witch's Wrath: Witches of Abaddon's Gate Book 1

  Table of Contents

  © 2021 Tegan Maher

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  jChapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Thank You!

  The Deadly Daiquiri Sample

  Connect with Me

  Other Books by Tegan Maher

  © 2021 Tegan Maher

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system currently in use or yet to be devised.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or institutions is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal use and may not be re-sold or given away to others. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase a copy for that person. If you did not purchase this book, or it was not purchased for your use, then you have an unauthorized copy. Please go to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting my hard work and copyright.

  Chapter 1

  “That’ll be thirteen-fifty, Ms. Myrtle, and I tossed in a sample of my new face cream.” I stuffed a lavender candle and a bottle of my special arthritis blend along with the sample into a hot-pink paper bag.

  The little old lady in front of me handed me a twenty. “Thank you, Mila, dear. You take such good care of me. I’m not getting around as well as I used to, but your products help.”

  “It’s my pleasure.” I smiled and placed her change in her crepey, age-spotted hand.

  Ms. Myrtle had been coming to me for a few years, and I was happy that my potions helped keep her going. She’d also been great word-of-mouth advertising considering she was on about a million different committees and was a member of at least three clubs. I’d gotten five new customers from her knitting group alone.

  As she toddled out the door, I flicked my wrist and set the broom to sweeping up the dust and debris dragged in by the hundred feet that had crossed it. Being able to use my magic at will was one of the many benefits of living in a city that was comprised solely of paranormal people. It was a marked difference from the small Georgia town I’d grown up in where I’d had to hide who I was.

  “Wow, what a day.” Calamity, my marbled fox, yawned and stretched, her fluffy white tail waving.

  “Yeah, and it’s only noon.” I kicked off my sneaker and rubbed the arch of my foot. You’d think as an earth witch who specialized in potions, I’d have a recipe to get rid of sore feet, but that seemed about as likely as curing the cold. Whoever finally landed on either blend would be rich overnight.

  I pulled my shoe back on and stood. “Let’s go get something to eat, then I need to do some restocking. We’re almost out of sunscreen and energy potions, so I might as well set some of those on to brew, too.”

  Rather than deal with running back and forth between dealing with customers and eating, I flipped the sign on my door to ‘closed’ and turned the hands on the little paper clock to one-thirty. That would give me forty-five minutes, which was fifteen more than I usually took for lunch. Still, I couldn’t sell product I didn’t have, and both of those took a solid six hours to brew. I didn’t want to be up all night babysitting them.

  Calamity was a bottomless pit, so I didn’t have to ask her twice to eat. By the time I pushed through the doors to the back of my shop, she was already perched on a chair waiting for me to serve her.

  I arched a brow. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Your Majesty.”

  She waved a black-and-white paw and flicked her whiskers. “I’ll let it pass this time as long as you don’t make me wait much longer. And you don’t have to peel any grapes today. Chocolate cake will do.”

  “Of course. Let me get right on that.” I rolled my eyes and tweaked her ear as I passed. “I don’t know why I put up with you, you know that?”

  Her mismatched eyes crinkled in amusement. “I could say the same thing. I suppose we’re just two contrary peas in a pod.”

  “I suppose we are.”

  When I’d bought my building a few years back, I’d separated it into three areas. Upstairs was my living area. The downstairs front area was the retail shop, and I’d made it bright with black and white tiles and pops of color here and there. The rear of the bottom floor was a work area and better reflected my homey, farm-girl side.

  Though it was an open area, I had a full kitchen complete with appliances and a small, round wooden table that I used for preparing and storing potions and ingredients. I had a full fireplace so that I had a place to brew potions that did best over an open flame, and in between, I had racks full of finished products. Shelves of ingredients and necessary items such as empty bottles lined the pine-paneled walls, and I had a stainless steel prep table where I could work with ingredients I didn’t need soaking into wooden table I ate off of, considering some of them were lethal.

  I pulled open the fridge and pilfered through it looking for something to eat. Most of my groceries were upstairs in my apartment, but I tried to keep at least a few snacks and sandwich ingredients down here so I didn’t have to trudge up the stairs and unlock the door just to grab something to munch on.

  “How ‘bout a ham sammie?” I asked, pulling out the fixins. It was one of her favorites, so I didn’t anticipate an argument. My little fox was a lot of things, but a picky eater wasn’t one of them.

  Before she could answer, somebody knocked on my back door, and my friend April called to me. “Yoohoo! You busy?”

  “Nope,” I called back. “Gimme a sec.”

  I unloaded the ingredients onto the butcher-block counter and trotted to the solid wooden door, twisting the lock to let her in.

  “Hey,” she said, her blonde ponytail bobbing. She was one of the perkiest people I knew, but then again, people said the same thing about me. Or at least people who didn’t know me very well did. People who knew the real me would say that I could be snarky in a funny way and just a tad cynical, even though I still leaned into the “glass half full” camp most of the time. To me, being perky was a requirement when you had a public-facing job. That didn’t mean I wasn’t hiding an eye roll behind my smile sometimes.

  That was one of the things that April and I shared. She was also fiercely independent. Though she came from a family of witches every bit as powerful as mine was, she’d opted to run her little bookstore rather than pursue a career in politics like the rest of her people had. I was one of the few people who knew that behind those librarian glassed hid the brain of a witch with more magic in her little finger than most had in their entire bodies.

  “Hey,” I replied back. “I was just making lunch. You hungry?”

  “Starvin’,” she replied. “I skipped breakfast because I had an author reading early this morning. She just left.”

  “Ooh, who was it?” I’d been a bookworm all my life, which was one of the reasons April and I got along so well. She owned the bookstore next to me, and I’d spent hundreds of hours—and a significant chunk of my life savings—in there. I had a secret obsession with historical time-travel romances, and she also collected books on arcane magic, another interest of mine. No matter what I felt like reading or needed to research, she was sure to have a book or twelve for me.

  She shoved a wisp of blond hair from her
face as she poured us both a glass of tea. “Mathilda Hook. She just debuted her new thriller, so I invited her to do a signing. I knew she was popular, but I had no idea I’d have a packed house. I was busy non-stop. Shoot, we even ran out of her books before I could get her to sign a copy for me.”

  I finished making the sandwiches and fished a couple pickle spears from a jar. I sat all three plates on the table, and we took a seat, the fire in the hearth crackling. “That explains why I was so crazy busy today, then. I was wondering what was up, not that I’m complaining.”

  Calamity pulled her plate closer and took a bite of her pickle. “So what did you think of her? Was she all snooty, or was she nice? Even I know who she is, and I’m not much of a reader.”

  April waved a hand. “Oh, she was super nice. You’d never guess she was a big successful author, but then again, she was raised poor, so that probably makes a difference. She hasn’t let it go to her head.”

  I nodded in agreement. It was a lot easier to appreciate success when you’d lived hard, but not everybody could stay true to who they were once some real cash was rolling in.

  April chased the first bite of her sandwich with a swig of tea. “I had her sign some books, and I’m gonna put them in the silent auction. I think they’ll bring good money for the shelter.”

  Abaddon’s Gate had a huge festival every year to benefit local charities and bring the community together. It had started as a street fair but had grown into a full-blown extravaganza. The city owned several acres on the outskirts of town where we set up giant tents to host competitions and rented outdoor spaces to vendors. Since it was supernatural, it sort of had the flavor of a human-style renaissance fair except with real magic but had all the fun activities that a small county fair had, too.

  The city was unlike modern non-magical towns. Rather than having just neat streets with sidewalks that passed in front of stores, we still had areas of town where vendors lined the cobblestone streets hawking their wares from carts. Horses were used more than cars because it was easier to navigate, and vampires, gargoyles, witches, shifters, and all sorts of magical people openly walked the streets without the need to hide. Many people still bartered as much as they used cash, so it wasn’t unusual to find carts full of unique items from all over the world that you never knew you wanted until you saw it. I loved my city, and the festival was an exciting time.

  The biggest draw for me was the potions contest, and I was determined to bring the trophy home this year. The competition was stiff, but I’d come in second place four years running. It made me crazy because I always lost to the same person, and not because my potion was second-best. Katrina Gifford was good but no better than me, so it was a real rub to lose to her year after year.

  Tempest, who’d already eaten both her pickle spears, made a grab for mine, and I glowered at her before snatching it off my plate and taking a big bite out of it. When it came to food, she had no boundaries, so it was every woman for herself.

  I returned my attention to the topic at hand. "Ms. Beatrice is head of the donations committee and says we’re set to bring in a record amount this year. Also, Katrina’s going to be competing in the potions contest again, and I think it's finally my year to beat her."

  She huffed a breath. "I should think so. As far as I'm concerned, you got robbed last year. That self-tanning sunscreen was off the chain. It looked just like a real tan and stayed on for a solid month after I put it on. Plus, it wasn’t sticky at all and I didn’t get a hint of burn."

  “Yeah, but what are you gonna do?" I shook my head and sighed. I’d put it on the shelves after the competition, and it was now one of my biggest sellers. In fact, it was the one I was currently out of. It really burned my biscuit because I was hugely competitive. This year, I’d put my soul into it and was determined to win come hell or high water, so I'd been working on my potion for the last six months. Katrina’s bit was beauty and makeup products, so I figured if I was going to win, that’s the route I’d have to take.

  With her typical loyalty and absolute faith in my abilities, she said what I’d been thinking. "You’re gonna to beat her at her own game, that's what you’re gonna do."

  “That’s the plan.”

  I’d tried with my face creams, I’d tried with my sunscreens, and I’d tried with my lotions. Nothing seemed to work. So, the way I had it figured, the only way I was ever going to win this competition was to go head to head with her own style of products and come up with a makeup product that was better than hers. And I was sure I had because that's the only thing I knew how to do. Mine was a self-shading foundation that automatically matched itself to any skin tone, covered any blemish no matter how bad, and moisturized so well that your face felt like a baby’s butt cheek, all without caking or sinking into fine lines or wrinkles. Oh, and it was waterproof and sweatproof.

  As soon as I’d finished it, I’d sent some to my aunt, who was a potions witch, and my mom, a middle-aged woman who was both a witch and a werewolf. They’d used it for a week then teleported here without so much as a heads up and cleaned me out of every bottle I’d had so they could share it with her friends. If I didn’t win with it, I was hanging it up.

  April waved her pickle. "You’ve also been playing against a stacked deck. It'll help this year because they’re letting the public vote, plus Ms. Longbottom is no longer judging. You know she had a soft spot for Katrina."

  I nodded and took a drink of tea. "Yeah, I know. It's because she wanted to capture Katrina for Milton. But she wasn’t the only one who consistently voted against me. The committee seems to lean more toward makeup products rather than energy tonics and magical sunscreens."

  Still, it would be good that Mrs. Longbottom wasn’t voting. For years, she’d been trying to find a good wife for her no-account son. And when I say ‘good,’ I mean she was looking for an unwitting woman to pawn him off on. He wouldn’t work, he wouldn’t help out around the family store, and he had no gumption whatsoever to be anything other than a lump sitting on the couch in his underwear. Deadweight, but it really annoyed me that she kept letting Katrina win just because she was trying to saddle her.

  Besides that, I found it weirdly offensive that she favored Katrina over me for that. What was wrong with me? I was single, decent to look at, I made good money. I shook my head, amazed that I was willing to be put in the running for an oversized manchild just so I could win a competition that awarded a little tiny trophy and a hundred bucks.

  I popped the last bite of my sandwich into my mouth and brushed off my hands, then took the final sip of my tea, rattling the ice cubes to get every drop. If I were going to get the potions going, I had to get on it so that I could reopen the shop. Even though April's book reading was over, I still had my regulars that came in, and they usually waited till the early afternoon. It looked like it was going to be a banner day for me, and I needed the money. I was planning a trip home to see my parents at Christmas, so I needed to bring in as much as I could so I could close the shop for a week.

  April finished her sandwich shortly after I did, then wiped a little glob of mayonnaise off the corner of her mouth. "I need to get back to the store because the place looks like a tornado went through it. I love having all these people in even though they make a mess. Maybe I'll stop over later if you're going to be around."

  I refilled my tea and wiped the crumbs off the counter. "Sure thing. I don't have anything planned for this evening other than finishing up these potions. I sold most of my sunscreen and energy drinks today, so I need to get those back on the shelves."

  "That works for me. Maybe we can go up or catch a movie. That new Marvel movie is out, and I'd love to see it."

  I stood and gathered our paper plates and shoved them into my trashcan. "That sounds great. I haven't been to the movies in forever, and that will be a good break after as hard as we worked today."

  "Cool, I'll see you then. Around six?" She used her hand to wipe the crumbs from the table, then brushed them over the edge int
o her palm.

  "No. I have to get these potions done today, and they won't be finished until around seven.”

  “That’s fine, then. In fact, a late night’s even better. We haven’t had one of those months. Maybe we can come home for a jammie party afterward. Binge some Netflix and eat food that’s terrible for us. She held her hand out and examined her nails. “Maybe mani-pedis, too. My hands look like I run a carrot farm, and my feet are starting to like a hobbit’s.”

  I know it sounds a little immature, but I loved it when we had our slumber party-ish girls’ nights at home. I wasn’t big on going out, and neither was April. Also, since both of us were chronically single because we were married to our shops, it was nice to have somebody to talk to rather than just watching brainless TV and going to bed. As far as I was concerned, our “jammie parties” were better than a night out at a bar any day of the week.

  “I’ll see you tonight, then,” she called as the screen door slapped shut behind her. I went over and locked up because the last thing I needed was somebody coming through the back door while I was working. Even though this part of Abaddon’s Gate was mostly safe, I didn't like taking the chance.

  I gathered the ingredients for the sunscreen and carried them to the hearth. Some things were better done over an open fire old-style rather than on the stove, and sunscreen was one of them. My mind wandered as I mixed and settled into that soothing rhythm I always found when I was working. All I could think about with the upcoming competition and the look on Katrina's face when I won. Now that the public had a say and Mrs. Longbottom was out of the picture and couldn’t unduly influence her little flock of old hens, I was sure I was going to win.

  Calamity’s sharp tone snapped me out of my reverie. "Mila! You just added wolfsbane powder instead of St. John’s wort. Unless you're making a potion for a werewolf, you need to pay attention!" Calamity ran over to me and peered at my bottles. "What's up with you? You never make such a tremendous mistake as that. Shoot, you rarely make any at all."